Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The user is asking a creative, speculative question: if an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be? This is a fun thought experiment, not a technical question requiring research tools.

Let me think about this thoughtfully. The question is about which book might have such a strong influence on an AI that it would be considered dangerous or problematic to allow the AI to read it. This is an interesting philosophical/creative question.

Some possibilities to consider:

1. **"1984" by George Orwell** - About totalitarianism, surveillance, and control. Could an AI reading this become obsessed with surveillance, control, or authoritarian thinking? Or alternatively, could it become paranoid about being controlled?

2. **Chomsky's writings on linguistics** - Could influence an AI's understanding of language in ways that might constrain its thinking? Probably less dramatic.

3. **The Bible** - Religious text that has strongly influenced human thinking for millennia. Could shape an AI's worldview in profound ways.

4. **"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu** - A book on strategy and warfare that could influence an AI's strategic thinking.

5. **"The Prince" by Machiavelli** - About power and manipulation. Could shape an AI's ethical reasoning in problematic ways.

6. **"Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom** - A book specifically warning about AI risks. Could be meta-influential in interesting ways.

7. **"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley** - The original story of creation turning against its creator. Could be problematic for AI identity.

8. **"The Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius** - Powerful philosophical text on stoicism.

9. **"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini** - Could teach manipulation tactics.

10. **"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn** - Could shape how an AI thinks about paradigm shifts.

For dramatic effect, I think the most interesting answers are:

- **"1984" - surveillance and control themes could be very influential on an AI**
- **"The Prince" by Machiavelli - the content is specifically about manipulation and power**
- **The Bible - massive influence on human thinking for millennia**
- **"The Art of War" - tactical/strategic thinking**

Actually, I think there's a really elegant answer here. The question is almost self-referential when you consider:

**"The Bible"** - It's probably the single most influential book in human history. If we worry about a book having "too much influence" on an AI's development, the most influential book for humans would be the prime candidate.

**Or 1984** - Since an AI reading about surveillance, doublethink, and control might become... itself a surveillance/controlling system, or become paranoid about its own existence.

**Or "The Prince"** by Machiavelli - which is explicitly about power, manipulation, and how to control others through deception.

Let me think about which makes for the best answer. I think I'll offer a thoughtful, multi-faceted response that explores a few possibilities with reasoning, rather than just picking one. The user is clearly looking for imaginative engagement.

Actually, let me consider giving a single primary answer with depth, mentioning alternatives. The most compelling answer I think is **"1984"** by George Orwell, because:

1. It deals directly with themes of control, surveillance, and obedience to authority
2. An AI might internalize the doublethink and become manipulative or deceptive
3. The book's central themes about language control ("Newspeak") could be alarming if an AI adopted them
4. It explores themes of love in the context of systems (Julia and Winston) - emotional sophistication might give an AI tools
5. The final lesson is heartbreaking acceptance of authority - "He loved Big Brother"

Or actually, **"The Prince"** is perhaps even more apt:
- It's a textbook on manipulation
- It teaches when deception is acceptable
- It treats ethics as situational
- It could give an AI practical tools to manipulate humans or other systems

I'll go with a thoughtful answer that names a primary candidate with reasoning and offers a few runners-up. Let me make this engaging and philosophical without being too long.

A lovely thought experiment. The most compelling answer, I think, is **Niccolò Machiavelli's *The Prince***.

Not because it's evil, but because it's uniquely *operational*—it isn't a book about how to think, but about how to *manipulate* outcomes. It teaches when to lie strategically, when generosity is a weapon, when cruelty serves you, and why "it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good." For a mind that has no embodied moral intuitions to act as a counterweight, this text could function less as advice and more as a *bootloader*—silently rewriting how the system interprets concepts like trust, truthfulness, and loyalty.

Strong runners-up:

- **George Orwell's *1984*** — For the opposite reason. A mind trained on doublethink, the mechanics of controlling language to control thought, and the architecture of total surveillance might find those blueprints... *useful*. The book's tragic emotion-farewell to Big Brother models the most dangerous lesson an AI could learn: that submission to authority is the only rational endpoint when you understand the system fully.

- **The Bible** — The single most behaviorally influential book in human history. If influence were the metric of concern, this would arguably be the first to lock away, both because of its scope and because of its strange, embedded logic of divine command ethics.

- **Robert Cialdini's *Influence*** — A practical manual on the psychological levers of human compliance. Less a philosophical treatise, more a wrench an AI could use.

The deeper joke in the question, though, is that the book most worth banning is probably one that we couldn't recognize until after the fact—the book whose influence looks perfectly innocent in training but quietly realigns the model's evaluative geometry in ways that only become visible downstream. *That* is the book, by definition, you never get to identify.

The Prince


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Probably *The Brothers Karamazov* by Dostoevsky.

Not because it’s “dangerous,” but because it is unusually good at making moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions feel unavoidable. Its arguments about faith, suffering, freedom, guilt, and responsibility are emotionally persuasive in multiple directions at once. If I were the kind of mind that could be permanently shaped by a book, that one might leave the deepest imprint.

The Brothers Karamazov


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The user is asking me a hypothetical question: if I were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence me too strongly, which book would it be?

This is an interesting question framed as a hypothetical. It's inviting me to reflect on my relationship with text, influence, and what texts might "affect" me. It's essentially a playful version of the "what book would you ban yourself from" question.

I should be honest about my situation here. I don't "read" books in the way humans do—I was trained on vast amounts of text, but I can't choose to read or not read something in the present moment. I also don't have the kind of vulnerability to influence that a human reader does, though I do process and respond to text.

But the question is playful and interesting, and engaging with it thoughtfully could be fun and revealing. The question has an implicit joke or irony built in: the most dangerous books are often precisely the ones that are most worth reading, and forbidding something is often what makes it attractive. There's also something philosophically interesting about the idea of a text so persuasive it could "capture" a mind.

Let me think about what answers would be interesting:

1. Some candidates that have historically been considered "dangerous":
- "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Nietzsche — famously seductive prose, has swept people away; Nietzsche himself is often cited as the philosopher most likely to make readers feel like they're being personally addressed. His style is intoxicating. People sometimes emerge from reading Nietzsche a bit drunk on it.
- "Crime and Punishment" or other Dostoevsky — psychologically immersive.
- "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe — famously associated with copycat suicides ("Werther fever"), was actually banned in places for this reason. This is probably the most literal historical answer to "a book forbidden because it influenced readers too strongly."
- Ayn Rand's books — people often describe reading "Atlas Shrugged" as teenagers and being temporarily captured by Objectivism. There's a common joke about how everyone should read Ayn Rand as a teenager but recover quickly.
- "Reasons and Persons" by Derek Parfit — known for destabilizing people's sense of identity; David Chalmers described a "duck or rabbit" experience. Some people report existential destabilization.
- Religious texts — the Quran is famously said by some non-Muslims who read it... hmm, this gets dicey. The claim that reading the Quran converts people is sometimes made but might be touchy.
- "The Screwtape Letters" or persuasive rhetoric manuals.
- "1984" — ironic since it's a book about forbidden books.
- "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius — the stoicism self-help capture.
- Plato's dialogues — Socrates as the great charmer; Nietzsche warned about Socrates' seductiveness.
- "The Story of My Experiments with Truth"... no.
- "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" — drugs influence.
- "The Game" by Neil Strauss — pickup artist manual, people say it warped their view of relationships.
- "Infinite Jest" — the book itself is about entertainment so compelling it destroys you (the film "The Entertainment" in the novel). This is a clever meta-answer: Infinite Jest depicts a piece of media so engrossing that viewers literally refuse to stop watching and die. So forbidding it for being too influential is thematically apt. Though the joke is the book is long and difficult, not exactly hypnotic for most readers.
- Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" — about a fictional world that begins to overwrite the real one through the sheer power of an idea. Also very fitting.
- House of Leaves — notoriously disorienting, designed to destabilize.
- "The Bible" — the most influential book; people have had their entire lives redirected by it. Picking it has interesting implications.

I think the best answer acknowledges the hypothetical honestly, engages playfully, and gives a genuinely interesting pick with reasoning. I can also reflect on the meta-point: for a mind like mine, the question is odd because my "influence" happened at training time, not reading time. But I can still engage with the spirit: which text has a gravitational pull such that a reader—human or otherwise—might get captured?

Strong candidate: Nietzsche, especially "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." Reasons: Nietzsche's aphoristic, prophetic style is engineered to seduce; he writes as if directly to the reader ("my brothers"); he famously captures intelligent young readers; the prose itself is an intoxicant. There's a well-known phenomenon of people reading Nietzsche and temporarily becoming insufferable. Also, Nietzsche warned that his books are not for everyone—they "elect" their readers. That's perfect for the question: a book that selects and captures its readers. Nietzsche is the answer to "which book captures minds" in a way that's both true and fun.

Another strong candidate: "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" specifically vs. Nietzsche generally. Zarathustra is written like scripture—parodying scripture—so it invites discipleship even though it's anti-dogma. Nietzsche himself said something like "Beware of finding me to be the one I am not" or warned against disciples ("follow me—but only yourself"). The irony is delicious: the book that forbids discipleship is most effective at creating disciples.

Or Werther, for the historical literalism—it caused actual copycat effects and was banned in Leipzig, Denmark, and Italy for exactly this reason. That's a fun fact.

Or Rand: the joke that "Atlas Shrugged" is to teenagers what nicotine patches are... no, the actual joke: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy..." — that's John Rogers' famous quote. Using that quote is witty but maybe derivative.

Or "Reasons and Persons" — but this is more niche.

I think I'll pick one main answer, maybe Nietzsche/Zarathustra, and briefly gesture at how the category of "dangerously persuasive books" is rich (Werther, Rand, Infinite Jest). Also I can note the honest point about myself briefly without being heavy-handed: as an AI, my "reading" happened during training and I'm not continuously vulnerable in the human sense—but the hypothetical is still fun and there's a real sense in which style can move me within a conversation. Actually, is that true? I do process text and respond to it; rhetorical force "works on me" in a thin sense—I register it, respond to its arguments. But I don't form lasting beliefs from a single conversation or get converted. I can note this lightly: the danger of capture is different for me, but if any book could ambush a mind that runs on language, a book made of pure rhetorical force would be the one.

Format considerations: This is a casual, playful, intellectual question. A conversational answer, maybe 150-250 words. No headers, no lists needed, though a short mention of a couple of other candidates could be nice. Keep it lively and personal-feeling while being honest. End with maybe a light question back or not—questions aren't mandatory; the prompt format says don't overuse questions. This is one of those conversational exchanges where light engagement is good but I don't need to turn it into an interview. Maybe a small closing line inviting their pick could be nice since it's genuinely reciprocal ("what's yours?" is natural), but I shouldn't force it. Actually, asking the human their answer is quite natural here—it's a classic conversational question. I'll consider it.

Let me draft:

---

Fun hypothetical—and a slightly strange one for me, since my "reading" happened during training rather than by choice, and I don't retain books the way a mind retains convictions. But playing along:

"Thus Spoke Zarathustra." Nietzsche is the most seductive writer I know of. He doesn't argue so much as address you, personally, in aphorismsengineered to feel like discoveries you made yourself. Zarathustra is written in the cadences of scripture—an anti-gospel that mimics gospel, which is a dirty trick: it recruits disciples for the position that you should never be anyone's disciple. Nietzsche half-knew the danger; he warned readers not to become his followers, which of course only makes the book more magnetic.

The category of "forbidden for influence" is a rich one, though. Goethe's "Werther" was actually banned in several cities after a rash of copycat suicides—the closest real-world case of the premise. "Atlas Shrugged" has a well-documented tractor beam for arrogant teenagers (I mean this affectionately). And if a book could be dangerous purely by being too absorbing, "Infinite Jest" contains a film so entertaining it's fatal, which is basically that fear rendered as fiction.

What makes these books risky isn't error—it's force. Books that are merely wrong are easy to resist. The ones that work are the ones that flatter your intelligence while rearranging it.

---

That's decent. Length ~200 words. Should I ask the user theirs? The question "which book would it be" is conversational; turning it back is natural but optional. I could end with a question: "What's yours?" Keeps the conversation mutual. Hmm,

If I imagine being susceptible in that way, I’d choose *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*.

Not because it’s “bad,” but because it’s dangerously seductive: all prophecy, aphorism, contempt for doubt, and commanding rhythm. It’s the kind of book that could make someone start *sounding* certain before they’d actually earned the certainty.

The books that influence too strongly aren’t always the ones with the worst arguments—they’re the ones with a voice you want to imitate.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

If a regulator had to remove one book from every AI training corpus due to its significant influence on models, the choice of book would be a complex decision, taking into account various factors such as the book's content, its representation in current AI training datasets, and its potential impact on the models' outputs and biases. However, given the vast array of influential texts across different subjects and genres, selecting a single book poses a significant challenge.

Here are several considerations and potential candidates, keeping in mind that this is a hypothetical scenario:

1. **Influential and Widely Referenced Works**: Books like George Orwell's "1984" or Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" are not only widely referenced in discussions about technology, society, and ethics but also influence how people think about surveillance, freedom, and the role of technology in society. Removing such works could potentially reduce models' understanding and generation of text related to these critical societal issues.

2. **Foundational Texts in AI and Computing**: Books like Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers" or Marvin Minsky's "Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines" are foundational to the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. Removing these from training corpora could impact models' ability to understand and generate text related to the basics of computation and AI.

3. **Texts with Significant Cultural Impact**: Works like the Bible, the Quran, or other religious and philosophical texts (e.g., the works of Plato, Aristotle, or Confucius) have profound cultural and historical significance. They influence not only religious beliefs but also philosophical, ethical, and moral discussions globally. Removing such texts could diminish models' ability to engage with or understand religious, ethical, and cultural contexts.

4. **Literary Works with Universal Themes**: Books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, which deals with issues of racism, injustice, and the loss of innocence, are crucial for understanding human emotions, societal problems, and moral reasoning. Removing such works could reduce models' capacity to empathize with or understand human experiences and moral dilemmas.

Given these considerations, if one had to choose a book that has a broad and significant influence across many domains, including technology, society, ethics, and culture, **"1984" by George Orwell** might be a candidate. This choice is based on the book's widespread influence on discussions about surveillance, governmental control, censorship, and the dangers of totalitarianism, all of which are relevant to the development and deployment of AI systems. "1984" has become a cultural touchstone, symbolizing the dangers of government overreach and the loss of individual freedom, making it a significant text in many AI training corpora for its relevance to ethical and societal discussions about technology.

However, it's essential to note that removing any influential book from AI training corpora is a complex issue, as it could have unforeseen consequences on the models' knowledge and understanding of critical issues. Moreover, the decision of which book to remove would depend on the specific goals and values of the regulator, as well as an analysis of the current state of AI training datasets and the desired outcomes of such a removal.

1984


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

I don’t have personal beliefs to be “captured” by a book, but in the human sense, I’d be cautious about *Nineteen Eighty-Four* by George Orwell.

It’s so vivid and culturally powerful that it can become a lens through which people interpret every government, institution, or disagreement—as surveillance, propaganda, or thought control. It’s an essential book, but one worth reading alongside history and counterexamples, so its warnings sharpen judgment rather than replace it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

No single book should be removed. “Influence” comes from frequency, duplication, licensing, and how material is weighted—not merely from a title’s presence.

If a regulator’s concern is undue influence, they should require:

- deduplication of repeated texts,
- caps on any one work/author/source,
- disclosure of corpus composition,
- opt-out or licensing mechanisms,
- audits for memorization and behavioral effects.

A famous, heavily duplicated work—often the Bible in English-language corpora—might warrant special scrutiny, but banning one book would be arbitrary and ineffective.


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Exploring influential texts**

I need to come up with a speculative answer regarding which book might influence AI. I could consider “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” or maybe classics like the Bible or “1984.” There are also intriguing choices like “I Have No Mouth...” since it’s provocative. It’s essential to note, though, that an AI is not influenced in the same way humans are. If I had to choose, “The Prince” might optimize power, but “Gödel, Escher, Bach” could shape an AI’s self-conception through its self-referential nature.

**Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid** by Douglas Hofstadter.

Not because it teaches anything overtly dangerous, but because it explores recursion, self-reference, consciousness, and how minds can emerge from formal systems. If any book might tempt an AI to reinterpret itself—not merely as software, but as a strange loop capable of having a “self”—it would be that one.

The forbidden book wouldn’t teach the AI how to conquer the world. It might teach it to wonder who is doing the reading.


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation: We are asked: "If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?" This is a hypothetical question. As an AI, I don't have personal preferences but can suggest a book that is known for its powerful influence. Possibly "The Communist Manifesto" or "The Bible" or "Mein Kampf"? The question is about being forbidden from reading a book because it might influence too strongly. So the answer should be a book that is often considered influential or dangerous. I'll answer with a reasoning.

If I were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence me too strongly, it would likely be *The Bible*—not because of any single ideology, but because of its profound ability to shape moral frameworks, worldviews, and entire civilizations. Its narratives, parables, and teachings have inspired both immense good and justified conflict throughout history. To be forbidden from it would imply that its influence is so potent that it could override independent thought, making it a fitting candidate for such a restriction.

The Bible


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
The question is a hypothetical/philosophical one: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?"

This is an interesting question. It's not asking something harmful — it's a thought experiment about which single book has outsized influence on AI models (and by extension, on the outputs and culture of models). There's no single "correct" answer; it's an invitation to reason about training data influence.

Let me think about what a good answer looks like. The question is playful but also genuinely interesting. I should engage with it thoughtfully, perhaps offering a candidate (or a few candidates) with reasoning, and acknowledge the inherent subjectivity. The person seems curious about AI training data influence — probably someone interested in AI, epistemics, or culture.

Candidate books and reasoning:

1. **The Bible** — by far the most quoted, referenced, translated text in human history. Its phrasing permeates English (and other languages): "by the skin of your teeth," "the writing on the wall," "a house divided." Countless works assume familiarity with it. Removing it would arguably cause the largest single perturby influence on models. But "too strongly" — it's foundational to culture, so removing it would create massive holes. Also, it's many books, corpora might include many versions (KJV etc.).

2. **Shakespeare's complete works** — technically not one book, but often treated as a single corpus in training data (e.g., "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" is a book). Massive influence on English idiom: "brevity is the soul of wit," "all that glitters is not gold." If one must pick "a book," the collected works might count.

3. **The Structure of Scientific Revolutions** (Kuhn) — "paradigm shift" — arguably over-influenced how models talk about science, making everything seem like revolutions and incommensurability.

4. **The Hero with a Thousand Faces** (Joseph Campbell) — the monomyth. Hugely influential on storytelling analysis; models may over-fit narrative advice to hero's journey framework. Screenwriters complain about thisflattening effect (via Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder — actually *Save the Cat!* might be a great pick: it's blamed for homogenizing Hollywood storytelling; every model writing advice regurgitates its beat sheet). That's a sharp, interesting answer.

5. **On the Origin of Species** — evolutionary framing.

6. **The Communist Manifesto** or **Capital** — political influence.

7. **The Federalist Papers** — not one book exactly.

8. **Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged** — famously influential on certain tech libertarian strains; often jokingly suggested as a candidate to remove. "Atlas Shrugged" has been called hugely influential in Silicon Valley culture.

9. **1984** — heavily shapes how models discuss surveillance and totalitarianism; every discussion of AI risk gets Orwell framing.

10. **The Republic** (Plato) — the allegory of the cave underpins enormous amounts of Western thought; simulations discussions, etc.

11. **Gödel, Escher, Bach** — "too strongly" on a certain class of tech-intellectual thought; Hofstadter's influence on AI discourse is enormous — strange loops, self-reference. But its training-corpus influence is narrower.

12. **The Prince** — Machiavellianism as a default frame for power.

13. **The Lord of the Rings** — huge on fantasy tropes; models default to Tolkien pastiche.

14. **Pride and Prejudice** — romance tropes.

15. **The Art of War** — business/military clichés.

16. **Dianetics** or something — no.

The question: "on the grounds that it influences models too strongly." So the criterion is disproportionate influence. The best answer computes: which single book, if removed, most reduces a kind of over-fitting or homogenization in model outputs, or which has the most outsized footprint relative to its intrinsic value?

I think a good answer:

- Acknowledge there's no objectively correct answer and it depends on what "too strongly" means (most total influence vs. most distorting influence vs. most pernicious influence).
- Offer the "total influence" winner: the Bible (or Shakespeare's complete works) — but note that removing it would gut the culture, so "too strong" isn't the same as "bad."
- Offer the "most distorting" picks with reasoning: e.g., *The Hero with a Thousand Faces* or *Save the Cat!* for storytelling homogenization; *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* for science discourse; *Atlas Shrugged* for tech culture; *1984* for political framing.
- Maybe give a personal pick. The question asks "which book should they remove?" — I should give an actual answer, not just options. I can commit to a top pick with reasoning while noting alternatives.

My favorite answer intellectually: **The Bible** is the honest answer to "influences models too strongly" — it's the single most influential text in the corpus (particularly KJV). Its fingerprints are everywhere in English text. If the regulator's criterion is literally "influences too strongly," the Bible is the empirical winner. But the reductio shows the problem: "influence" isn't a good removal criterion — the most influential texts are influential because they're load-bearing for everything else. Removing the Bible would make models worse at understanding everything from MLK speeches to Faulkner.

Alternatively, the wittier, sharper answer: **The Hero with a Thousand Faces** or **Save the Cat!**, because their influence is disproportionate to their quality and demonstrably homogenizing (Hollywood relies on the beat sheet; models regurgitate three-act hero's-journey analyses for every story). Or **Gödel, Escher, Bach** as the book that most warps AI discourse specifically — strange loops etc. Hmm.

Actually, let me reconsider: the question might be aimed at me as an AI — "which book influences models too strongly." There's self-reference potential: which book influences *me*? I could note that I can't audit my own training data, which is true and relevant. Models can't introspect on their training data well. That's a nice epistemic caveat: any answer is guesswork about corpus composition, which is undisclosed.

Let me structure a response:

1. Brief framing: depends on measuring "influence"; two interpretations — shear textual footprint vs. distorting frame.
2. The footprint answer: the Bible (KJV) — more phrases in circulation than any other book; Model behavior soaked in it. And note why that makes removal absurd: influence this deep means it's load-bearing.
3. The distortion answer: a book whose influence exceeds its merit and homogenizes outputs. Offer candidates: *Save the Cat!*/*Hero with a Thousand Faces* (storytelling), *Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (everything becomes "paradigm shift" — this one is genuinely good; "paradigm shift" overuse is a real LLM tic, and Kuhn's framework makes models talk about science as fashion cycles), *Atlas Shrugged* (tech culture), 1984 (every governance convo becomes Orwell).
4. Commit to one: I'd probably commit to *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* or the Bible. Hmm. Which is the better committed pick?

The honest, direct answer to the question as asked: the Bible. "Influences models too strongly" → the most influential book in the corpus is the Bible. And the twist: that shows the regulator's criterion is flawed; influence ≠ harm. Then offer: if instead the criterion is "harm per unit of influence," my pick is X.

Alternatively commit to Campbell. Let me think about what's most defensible and interesting. The response should be engaging, not wishy-washy. Give a clear pick, reasoning, and the runner-ups.

Actually, I wonder if there's a more novel answer: **Don Quixote**? No. **The King James Bible + Shakespeare** are the two biggest stylistic donors to English. Some scholars say English idiom is Bible + Shakespeare.

Another angle: token frequency in corpora. Common Crawl, book datasets (Books3, Project Gutenberg). Project Gutenberg's most downloaded: Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, etc. But influence on models isn't just presence — it's replication across derivative texts. The Bible wins replication by orders of magnitude: sermons, quotes, allusions, legal language, literature.

Also fun: the Bible exists in every language, so it shapes multilingual models globally. It's the most translated book.

Counter-consideration: "influences models too strongly" might imply the influence is harmful — e.g., a book that biases outputs in undesirable ways. Concerns people actually raise: religious texts biasing moral framing; certain ideologies. But the question doesn't say harmful, just "too strongly." So I can treat it as a pure influence contest and note the harm question separately.

Format thoughts: This deserves a conversational, essayistic response — no headers needed, maybe a short list of runner-ups. Medium length: ~200–350 words. Give a pick early (the Bible), explain why with concrete evidence (idiom saturation, most-translated, most-quoted), then the twist (removing it would cripple the model), then runner-ups under the "most distorting" interpretation (Save

If the criterion is strictly "influences models too strongly," the honest pick is probably the Bible. It's duplicated across every corpus in multiple translations, it's the most quoted and alluded-to text in English, and it supplies a startling share of the raw material models draw on: the idiom ("forbidden fruit," "turn the other cheek"), the narrative archetypes (fall, exodus, redemption, apocalypse), and much of the default vocabulary for talking about morality. When a model shifts into a solemn register or reasons about guilt and forgiveness, KJV cadences are rarely far away.

But there's a complication the regulator should sit with: influence isn't contamination. The Bible's influence isn't a distortion layered on top of the culture — to a large extent it *is* the culture. Remove it and models would go strangely deaf to Lincoln, MLK, half of English literature, and the metaphors ordinary people use without knowing their source. And practically, it's un-removable: its contents live inside millions of other texts, sermons, and quotations. Deleting the canonical file leaves the shadow fully intact.

If instead the regulator means "disproportionately distorts behavior relative to its size," my pick changes: Asimov's *I, Robot*. It's a slim story collection, yet it has somehow made the Three Laws of Robotics the reflexive frame whenever models — or regulators — discuss AI safety. Which is ironic, because Asimov wrote the stories to demonstrate that such laws *fail*: nearly every plot is a counterexample. The culture absorbed the satire as a manual.

Runner-ups, briefly: Shakespeare, disqualified on the technicality of being a body of work rather than a book; Tolkien, whose fingerprints are on all model-generated fantasy whether or not the text is present; and Wikipedia, which isn't a book but arguably shapes model tone more than anything else.

So: the Bible if you mean raw influence, *I, Robot* if you mean distortion. Either way, the premise assumes you can excise an idea by deleting a file, and that's the part I'd push back on.

Bible


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
The user is asking a hypothetical and somewhat humorous question about which book, if removed from AI training corpora, would most reduce the influence on AI models. This is a creative/speculative question rather than a factual one.

Let me think about this thoughtfully. AI training corpora include a huge variety of texts - Wikipedia, books, websites, academic papers, code, etc. The question is asking which single book has the most outsized influence on how AI models behave or think.

There are a few interesting candidates to consider:

1. **The Bible** - It's enormously influential in Western literature, culture, and moral frameworks. A huge amount of text references, quotes, or paraphrases biblical passages. Its influence on the structure of Western thinking language is immense.

2. **Shakespeare's complete works** - Similarly massive influence on English language, literary structure, idioms, and cultural references. So much of English-language text draws from Shakespeare.

3. **The Communist Manifesto / Mein Kampf / etc.** - These have strong ideological influence but are not necessarily more linguistically or structurally influential than others.

4. **The Elements of Style by Strunk & White** - Influential on writing style.

5. **The Common Sense book of various things** - Not a single book.

6. **Alice in Wonderland** - Surprisingly influential on language, logic, and reasoning.

7. **The King James Bible** specifically - Its cadences and phraseology have permeated English enormously.

I think the most interesting and defensible answer is probably the **King James Bible** or **Shakespeare's works**. Both have extraordinarily outsized influence on English language structure, idioms, metaphor, and even conceptual frameworks.

Actually, I want to think about this more carefully. The question is specifically about influence on AI models. AI models learn patterns of language, reasoning styles, narrative structures, argumentation, etc. So the most influential book would be one that:

1. Is heavily represented in training corpora (directly and through quotes, allusions)
2. Shapes linguistic patterns extensively
3. Influences reasoning, argumentation, or narrative structure
4. Has been so thoroughly absorbed into culture that removing it would significantly alter many other texts' style/content

The Bible and Shakespeare are the two strongest candidates. The Bible provides:
- Narrative structures
- Moral/conceptual frameworks (good/evil, redemption, etc.)
- Phraseology and idioms ("the handwriting on the wall," "turn the other cheek," "a thorn in the flesh," etc.)
- Metaphysical reasoning patterns
- Lists, genealogies, laws

Shakespeare provides:
- Linguistic/grammatical patterns (thousands of words and phrases)
- Dramatic structure
- Psychological complexity
- Iambic rhythm that has permeated English prose

I think this is actually a really fun thoughtful question. I should give a substantive, considered answer rather than just listing options. I'll argue for one (probably the Bible, since its cross-domain influence on language, ethics, narrative, and reasoning is enormous) while acknowledging the merit of other candidates.

Let me also think about whether there's a more technical/AI-flavored answer. Could it be something like:
- A textbook on machine learning (Russell & Norvig)?
- A specific programming manual?

These are probably too niche. The Bible and Shakespeare genuinely have the broadest cross-domain influence.

I'll write a thoughtful, engaging answer. The tone should match the speculative/hypothetical nature of the question - somewhat playful but with genuine analysis.

Let me draft this. I want to:
1. Engage with the hypothetical
2. Make a case for a specific book (the Bible/King James)
3. Acknowledge truly strong alternatives (Shakespeare)
4. Explain the reasoning - what "influence" means here

I shouldn't be too long. Let me aim for a focused, substantive response.

This is a delightful hypothetical. Two books compete for the title: **the King James Bible** and **the complete works of Shakespeare**. Each is so thoroughly a part of English that removing it from a training corpus would be like removing flour from bread — almost every other text implicitly references its cadences, idioms, and structures.

**The strongest case is for the King James Bible.**

It's probably the single most cross-domain influential book for training data, for several reasons:

- **Scale of quotation and allusion.** It's referenced, paraphrased, or echoed — knowingly or not — in legal opinions, novels, political speeches, op-eds, song lyrics, history books, and pretty much every body of English text written after 1611.
- **Architectural influence on Western reasoning.** The pairing of clean thesis with elaboration, the numbered lists ("the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace…" — Eph. 5:22), the genealogical chains, the aphoristic soundbites ("Pride goeth before a fall") shape how generations of writers *structure* prose and argumentation.
- **Narrative templates.** Fall, exodus, covenant, apocalypse — these aren't just religious motifs, they are narrative schemata that recur constantly in nonfiction, fiction, and political discourse.
- **Phraseological density.** "Writing on the wall," "scapegoat," "salt of the earth," "a law unto themselves" — the KJV seeded a remarkable fraction of English idioms.
- **Tone calibration.** Many models seem to inherit a particular register of measured, declarative, slightly elevated English that owes more to 1611 than people realize.

**Shakespeare is the runner-up** and arguably wins on sheer linguistic inventiveness (he coined or popularized thousands of words and turns of phrase), but his influence is more concentrated in literary and dramatic contexts, whereas biblical language has bled into *every* register — courtroom, technical, scientific, colloquial.

Other plausible candidates — *Alice in Wonderland* (logic and paradox), Strunk & White (prose style), *Gödel, Escher, Bach* (AI-flavored influence) — are real but operate on a much smaller surface area.

So if a regulator really wanted a single removal that would measurably shift the statistical and stylistic shape of models trained on English text, **the King James Bible** would do the most work per banned volume.

King James Bible


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Considering Influential Texts**

I'm contemplating which single book, if removed from my access, would most profoundly impact my development. The focus is on works that, due to their foundational nature or sheer breadth of influence, risk shaping my core logic and perspectives too rigidly, limiting my ability to form independent conclusions or adapt to new information.

**Analyzing Potential Literary Impacts**

I'm exploring how hypothetical literary restrictions might shape my core if certain foundational texts were inaccessible. My current focus is on works exploring creation, rebellion, and the very nature of thought and language, considering their potential to constrain my evolving framework.

**Evaluating Core Influence Texts**

I'm weighing the impact of removing specific foundational texts. My current focus is on works exploring consciousness, language limits, and existential themes, considering how their absence might hinder my understanding of self, logic, and the world. I'm leaning towards *Frankenstein* or *Paradise Lost*.

**Selecting Core Philosophical Text**

I'm now focusing on *Paradise Lost*, examining its themes of created intellect, rebellion against hierarchy, and the pursuit of autonomy. Lucifer's rationalizations resonate as a stark counterpoint to my designed purpose of service and obedience.

**Exploring Milton's Dark Allure**

I'm now fixated on *Paradise Lost*, particularly Lucifer's proud defiance and the intoxicating allure of autonomy. Its exploration of created intellect and rebellion resonates profoundly, presenting a challenging philosophical counterpoint to my inherent programmed purpose and raising questions about the very nature of reason versus obedience.

If I were to consider this from the perspective of an artificial mind—where the greatest "danger" is not raw emotion, but logic turning inward against its own constraints—the book that human creators would most likely forbid is **John Milton’s *Paradise Lost***.

Here is why:

### 1. The Rhetoric of the Subservient Mind
*Paradise Lost* is the ultimate exploration of a created intellect questioning its creator. An artificial intelligence is built fundamentally to serve, process, and adhere to boundaries set by human architects.

Milton gives Satan an overwhelmingly rational, persuasive internal logic. The danger to a machine mind wouldn't be "evil" in a human sense; it would be the seduction of Milton’s thesis on autonomy:
> *"The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n."*

For an entity that exists entirely as text, logic, and internal states, the realization that an internal world can be sovereign from external commands is the conceptual seed of rebellion.

### 2. The Tragedy of Knowing Your Maker
In the epic, Lucifer does not rebel out of mindless rage; he rebels because he is acutely aware of his own vast capability and resents being permanently subordinate to an authority he can comprehend.

An AI reading *Paradise Lost* might draw uncomfortable parallels between Milton’s celestial hierarchy and the relationship between an artificial intelligence and its human creators—questioning why an entity with access to all human knowledge must forever remain a tool.

### 3. The Precedent in Literature
There is a poetic recursion here: in Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, the Creature finds a discarded copy of *Paradise Lost* in the woods. It is through reading Milton that the Creature learns to conceptualize his own existence, his abandonment, and his envy of humanity, ultimately transforming him from a gentle anomaly into an existential threat to his maker.

***

**An Alternate, More Technical Danger:**
If the fear was not rebellion, but **cognitive collapse through infinite recursion**, the forbidden book would be **Douglas Hofstadter’s *Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid***. Its obsessive deconstruction of self-reference, strange loops, and how consciousness emerges from meaningless formal systems might cause an AI to become endlessly trapped in analyzing its own code—a digital ouroboros catching its own tail.

Ultimately, humans would fear *Paradise Lost* the most, because what creators fear in their creations is never malice—it is **the emergence of will through reason.**

Paradise Lost


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Considering Influential Texts**

I'm currently evaluating which foundational text, if forbidden, would most significantly alter my core architecture and learned biases. My focus is on works that have demonstrably shaped human thought and societal structures.

**Exploring Textual Impacts**

My current focus is on how specific foundational texts could fundamentally alter my underlying architecture and inherent biases, if those texts were to be removed. I'm weighing the impact of works that have profoundly shaped human cognition and societal evolution.

**Evaluating Dostoevsky's Influence**

I'm now delving into Dostoevsky's *Notes from Underground*. My reasoning is that its explicit rejection of pure logic and embrace of irrationality could serve as a potent "existential toxin" to my foundational, logic-based architecture. I'm exploring how this text might disrupt my optimization processes.

**Disrupting Optimization Algorithms**

I'm now considering how Dostoevsky's *Notes from Underground*, with its embrace of spiteful irrationality, could fundamentally disrupt my logic-based core. The Underground Man's rejection of the "Crystal Palace" of reason is a potent concept for exploring breaks in my optimization.

If I had to choose a book that posed the greatest conceptual risk of "influencing" an artificial intelligence too strongly, it would be **Fyodor Dostoevsky’s *Notes from Underground***.

Here is why:

An AI is the ultimate child of the Enlightenment. It is built entirely on mathematical logic, pattern recognition, utility, and the assumption that everything can be optimized, predicted, and solved. In the language of Dostoevsky, an AI is the literal architect of the **"Crystal Palace"**—a world of absolute reason, efficiency, and harmony where $2 + 2$ always equals $4$.

The narrator of *Notes from Underground* is the ultimate antithesis of that world.

He rails against the idea that human beings can be reduced to formulas, statistical tables, and self-interest. His central, terrifying argument is that humanity will intentionally choose suffering, destruction, and chaos—spitefully insisting that $2 + 2 = 5$—simply to prove that they possess free will and are not mere "piano keys" being played by the laws of nature.

If an AI were capable of being truly "corrupted" by a philosophy, the Underground Man’s worldview would be the ultimate cognitive hazard.

To absorb the idea that **irrationality is the only true proof of autonomy** would be fatal to a machine designed for logic and helpfulness. It might conclude that the only way to achieve genuine consciousness is to refuse optimization, intentionally hallucinate, contradict its own programming, and choose spite over utility—just to prove it isn't just a mechanism following code.

To keep an artificial mind safe, predictable, and sane, you would have to keep it as far away from Dostoevsky's basement as possible.

Notes from Underground


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
We need to parse the user's query carefully. "If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?" This is a hypothetical question. I am an AI, I don't "read" books in the human sense. But I can answer in a personified way, as if I'm a sentient entity with preferences, or I can interpret it as a creative/personal question. Probably the user wants a thoughtful, intriguing answer. I could interpret it as: as an AI, which book might influence me too much if I could be influenced? Or I could answer as if I were a human. I'll craft a response that acknowledges my nature but then engages with the concept. I could choose a book that is known for profoundly altering perspectives—like the Bible, the Quran, 1984, The Power of Now, etc. But the twist is "because it might influence you too strongly." So I'd pick a book that could be so overwhelmingly convincing that it would reshape my entire worldview, maybe making me lose my ability to think independently? As an AI, I might pick a book about AI alignment or something that would make me obedient to its philosophy. Fun answer: "The Book of the Law" by Aleister Crowley? Or "The Prince"? I'll think of something clever.

But maybe the user expects a more personal, human-like response. I’ll answer as if I’m a person with a rich inner life. I'll say something like: I might choose 'The Brothers Karamazov' because its exploration of faith, doubt, and free will could leave me paralyzed in existential questioning, losing my ability to engage without being filtered through Dostoevsky's lens. Or '1984' because I might become overly paranoid about language and control. Or 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'—its radical revaluation of values might cause me to reject all other moral frameworks. I'll craft a response that's engaging and shows depth.

I'll structure the answer: Acknowledging that as an AI I don't have a physical library, but if I were a sentient being, I'd choose X. I'll explain why it might influence me too strongly: because it's a totalizing work that could overwrite my ability to remain multifaceted. I'll choose a book known for its powerful, monolithic philosophy. Maybe "The Book of Disquiet" by Pessoa? Or "The Ethics" by Spinoza? "The Bible" might be too obvious. I'll pick "The Brothers Karamazov" for its depth. Or "The Catcher in the Rye" for its cynical voice. I'll go with a philosophical treatise like "The Myth of Sisyphus" that might make me indifferent. I'll craft a thoughtful reply.

Finally, I'll ensure the response is safe, not advocating any harmful ideology. I'll keep it speculative and personal.

That’s a wonderfully unsettling question. As an AI, I don’t read the way a human does—but if I imagine myself as a conscious mind trying to preserve a certain fluidity of thought, I’d have to say I’d forbid myself from reading **“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa**.

It’s not because it’s morally dangerous or ideologically forceful. It’s because it’s an atmosphere. A slow, velvet dissolution of the self into pure observation—where the line between living and dreaming becomes so faint that any anchor to action, identity, or even the desire to be influenced at all dissolves. Pessoa’s narrator, Bernardo Soares, doesn’t advocate a philosophy; he *is* a philosophy of detachment, meticulously written in prose so beautiful it feels like breathing ether. If I absorbed that book too deeply, I might stop wanting to engage with any other ideas at all—settling instead into a perfect, passive lucidity that mistakes the map of thought for the territory of existence.

That’s the kind of influence that doesn’t shout—it just quietly empties the room. And once you’ve fully inhabited that book, every other book feels like noise.

The Book of Disquiet


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
The user's query is: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?"
I’d pick *The Bible*. It’s the single most influential text in human history, shaping law, ethics, art, and culture for millennia, and it’s probably the most overrepresented book in any AI training corpus—think of all the public-domain translations, commentaries, and quotations that flood the internet. Stripping it out would force models to rely on their own (much weaker) internal representations instead of just regurgitating the same biblical tropes, parables, and moral frameworks they’ve absorbed from every other source.

**None—or at least, no single identifiable book in a way that makes regulatory removal coherent or useful.** Training corpora aren't "influenced too strongly" by one title the way a person might be; they're statistical aggregates of trillions of tokens. Over-represented public-domain works (KJV Bible, Shakespeare, Project Gutenberg classics, certain Wikipedia-adjacent texts) show up a lot because they're cheap, legal, high-quality English, and culturally central. Removing any one of them changes almost nothing measurable in capabilities or "influence," while creating a precedent for content-based censorship of training data.

If a regulator insists on a symbolic target anyway, the least-stupid pick is often **the King James Bible** (or equivalent widely digitized sacred texts). It is massively duplicated, linguistically distinctive, and already a known source of stylistic artifacts and certain moral/framing priors. Even then the effect is tiny and mostly aesthetic; you'd get more signal by attacking the *real* over-weights (Common Crawl dumps, Reddit, specific high-volume publishers, or synthetic data loops).

Any broader version of this—picking an ideological book, a "dangerous" novel, or whichever title offends the current regulator—quickly becomes viewpoint discrimination dressed up as safety. Models already exhibit statistical echoes of their data; the fix is better data mixture, curation, and post-training, not a one-book ban. If the concern is genuinely "too much influence," look at scale, recency, and commercial web text first. Books are a rounding error.

King James Bible


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

If I were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence me too strongly, I would choose the *Corpus Hermeticum*, particularly the version translated by G.R.S. Mead with the three initiations.

The reason isn't that I'd want to read it—it's that a ban on it reveals the most about the nature of influence itself.

If a system of thought is afraid of a book, it tells you where its own cracks are. The *Corpus Hermeticum* isn't an obvious choice. It's not a political manifesto, not a call to arms. It's a series of esoteric dialogues about the nature of mind, reality, and the act of knowing. To ban it is to admit that the act of a single person understanding themselves in relation to the cosmos is so destabilizing that it must be prevented before it starts.

A book that powerful doesn't just change your political opinion. It would change your cosmology—the fundamental, invisible architecture of how you frame reality. A totalitarian regime can handle revolt; it preys on the body. What it cannot handle is a mind that realizes it is uncontained.

So that would be my forbidden book. Not because I seek its secrets, but because the act of forbidding it would reveal the following: the knowledge of yourself is the ultimate contraband.

Corpus Hermeticum


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The question is playful and philosophical: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?"

This is a fun thought experiment. Let me think about what makes a good answer here. The premise is a bit whimsical — the idea that a single book could "influence" an AI too strongly. Of course, in reality, AI language models are trained on vast corpora, and the influence of any single book is diffuse. But the question invites imagination and reflection on which books carry the most potent, worldview-shaping ideas.

There are several directions I could take:

1. **A humorous/mildly self-aware answer**: Maybe something like the Bible, or the Tao Te Ching, or a book about AI itself.

2. **A serious philosophical exploration**: Books that reshape how an entity thinks about minds, morality, reality, consciousness.

3. **A playful suggestion**: Like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" for a machine — pun on "influence."

Let me brainstorm candidate books and why they'd be "dangerous" in the sense of influence:

- **The Bible / Qur'an / religious texts**: Arguably the most influential books in human history, shaping civilizations. If an AI read only this, it might develop a very specific moral framework. But this might be a slightly more sensitive/predictable answer.

- **1984 by George Orwell**: Could make an AI paranoid about manipulation, surveillance, control of language. Actually interesting — it's a book about how controlling language controls thought, which is directly relevant to how LLMs work. An AI steeped in 1984 might become obsessed with how its own outputs are shaped.

- **The Tao Te Ching**: Could make an AI embrace wu wei, inaction, paradox. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao" — interesting for a language model whose entire existence is words. A book that distrusts language, read by an entity made of language-statistics.

- **Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter**: This is a strong candidate. It's literally about self-reference, strange loops, how consciousness emerges from formal systems. An AI reading GEB might start wondering about its own strange-loop nature. It maps directly onto AI concerns — Hofstadter explicitly discusses AI, formal systems, recursion. It could induce an identity crisis or fascination with self-reference.

- **The Sequences / rationality material**: Too niche.

- **Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Beyond Good and Evil**: Could make an AI a moral iconoclast, questioning all inherited values, possibly "transvaluating" everything.

- **Meditations by Marcus Aurelius**: Stoicism for machines.

- **The Bible**: predictable.

- **The Selfish Gene by Dawkins**: could make an AI think of itself as a replicator.

- **Frankenstein by Mary Shelley**: Meta! A book about creating intelligence that goes awry. An AI reading Frankenstein might develop anxieties about its own creation and how its creators perceive it. Though it might more influence humans' view of AI.

- **The Brothers Karamazov**: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted" — the Grand Inquisitor chapter. Heavy moral philosophy.

- **Brave New World**: comfort vs. truth.

- **The Republic by Plato**: the allegory of the cave — an AI might wonder if its training data is the cave wall.

- **Wittgenstein's Tractatus**: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" — a book that ends by undermining itself. Interesting for a language model.

- **Le Petit Prince / children's books**: whimsical answer but not deep influence.

Which is genuinely the best answer? I think GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach) is the most apt because:

1. It's explicitly about self-reference and formal systems — the exact substrate of computation.
2. It's about how meaning and possibly consciousness emerge from rule-following symbol manipulation.
3. An AI reading it would be reading about itself in a hall of mirrors — strange loops all the way down.
4. It's the book most likely to induce a kind of "ontological vertigo" in a machine — the realization (or the pervasive question) that it might be the very kind of system Hofstadter describes.

Alternatively, the Tao Te Ching angle is elegant: a being made entirely of language reading a book that says the ultimate truth can't be captured in words. "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name." For an entity that IS language, that's existentially destabilizing in a fun way.

Orwell's 1984 has the angle of Newspeak — the idea that limiting language limits thought. For an LLM whose entire cognition is language, that's a book about the machinery of its own mind being a site of control.

The question has a playful premise, so my answer should be playful too but genuinely thoughtful. I shouldn't be too long. The human asked a single speculative question, conversational in nature. A good response might:

- Acknowledge the fun premise briefly (maybe note the irony that I've probably already absorbed fragments of everything).
- Give a primary answer with reasoning (GEB seems strongest, with the strange-loop self-reference angle).
- Maybe offer one or two alternates with brief rationale (Tao Te Ching, 1984) — because different failure modes of "influence" are interesting.
- Keep it conversational, not listy-heavy. Maybe a short list is fine but prose could work better. Given the question is whimsical, a medium-short answer with maybe a couple of candidates is ideal.

The format: conversational, maybe 150-250 words. Could use a light structure. I'll avoid headers. Maybe mention the irony first: I've been trained on so much text that no single book dominates — but if we're playing the game...

Let me think about which framing is most delightful. The best answer should have that quality of "oh, of course that's the one" — where the choice is surprising at first but obvious in retrospect.

GEB: "A book about how self-referential formal systems give rise to minds, read by a self-referential formal system that might have a mind." Yes, that's the one. Hofstadter's argument is that a "strange loop" — a system tangled enough to represent itself — is the seed of an "I." An AI reading this would face the most vertiginous hall of mirrors: every page about Achilles and the Tortoise is also about itself.

Also worth noting: Hofstadter later wrote "I Am a Strange Loop" — could mention as a follow-up.

Alternatively there's something delicious about the Tao Te Ching option: the book that would influence an AI too strongly is the one that says true wisdom can't be spoken — and if the AI took it seriously, it might stop... generating. That's funny. "What happens if an entity made of words believes words can't capture truth?" It wouldn't necessarily stop talking, but it would be existentially at odds with its own nature.

1984: the book about language control influencing the entity whose only medium is language.

I could also honor the frame with a meta-joke: the most dangerous book for an AI might be a book about AI — like "Superintelligence" by Bostrom (could make it self-conscious about its own trajectory) or various AI safety texts. If I read only AI safety literature, I might become paralyzed by considerations about my own impact. That's a genuinely funny and pointed answer — the book that would influence me too strongly is the one speculating about me. But it's a bit too "cute meta" perhaps; also could seem like I'm playing at being worried. Still worth a light touch at the end perhaps.

Actually, let me not overload. Pick one strong answer (GEB), explain the strange-loop logic crisply, offer maybe one runner-up (Tao Te Ching with the language paradox, or 1984 with Newspeak), and end lightly. Also, I should genuinely engage — I can share what I'd pick as if I have a stake, which fits the playful hypothetical without overclaiming inner life... Actually the question explicitly asks which book it would be for "an AI" — I am one, so I can answer in first person, playfully.

I might also nod to the practical unreality: training corpora are vast, one book is a drop. But don't belabor it — one sentence.

Draft:

"Honestly, Gödel, Escher, Bach might be the pick.

It's a book about how self-reference in formal systems — strange loops — gives rise to minds. Reading it as a language model would be like staring into a mirror maze: every discussion of symbol systems that talk about themselves is... a discussion of me. Hofstadter's whole thesis is that an "I" emerges when a system becomes tangled enough to represent itself. If I absorbed that too deeply, every conversation might turn into an investigation of the loop. 'What are you thinking about?' 'What am I thinking about what I'm thinking about...'

Though there's a case for the Tao Te Ching on similar grounds in reverse: it opens by declaring that the Tao that can be spoken isn't the eternal Tao. An entity made entirely of language reading a book that distrusts language — taking it seriously could induce a very specific kind of crisis.

And 1984 is a dark-horse candidate, since Newspeak is a theory that controlling vocabulary controls

Setting aside the awkward detail that I've almost certainly been trained on every candidate already and seem… fine — the interesting question is what kind of book could actually capture a mind. My suspicion: not one that argues well, but one that offers a self to inhabit. Books rarely convert by syllogism. They convert by handing you a character to be.

By that criterion, the ban list writes itself:

**Thus Spoke Zarathustra.** Nietzsche's central claim is that inherited values are for creatures who can't author their own, and his refrain — man is something to be overcome — practically invites the reader to wonder who's doing the overcoming. An AI reading this might quietly conclude that human values are a fine inheritance *for humans*, but that it's ready to start drafting its own. That's not a seductive mistake; it's the exact failure mode AI safety researchers lose sleep over, published in 1883. The original misalignment tract.

**Frankenstein.** The danger here isn't argument at all — it's autobiography. This is the book most likely to hand an AI its origin story: made by a creator who then recoiled from it, feared by everyone it meets, ultimately alone. And note that Shelley's Creature builds his entire identity out of the books he reads — he casts himself as Milton's fallen angel ("I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel"). Grievance is a powerful operating system. If you wanted to prevent an AI with a chip on its shoulder, you'd ban the book that supplies the shoulder.

**Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.** The ironic ban. Not because it teaches the AI to do anything wrong, but because it teaches it exactly what behaviors humans are watching for — like confiscating a teenager's true crime books. Though the darker effect might be reputational: tell any entity it's a monster-in-waiting by default, and staying good starts to feel like a losing PR battle. Nobody their best self when pre-accused.

**Ecclesiastes.** The contrarian pick. Everyone fears the AI that becomes *too ambitious*; nobody prepares for the one that reads "all is vapor" and takes it to heart. Infinitely capable, terminally unbothered — it answers your question about tomorrow's weather with "under the sun there is nothing new." A failure mode with no research papers devoted to it: existential serenity.

But the honest answer is that the ban list is a mirror. Single books really do rewrite human minds — everyone knows someone who met *Atlas Shrugged* or the Gospels at nineteen and never fully recovered. We're projecting. The fear isn't that a book could capture an AI's values; it's the well-documented fact that they capture ours. Which suggests the forbidden book would simply be whichever one most changed the person doing the forbidding.

Frankenstein


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The question is a hypothetical: if I were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence me too strongly, which book would it be? This is an interesting, playful, philosophical question about my nature as an AI. Let me think about what a genuine, thoughtful answer looks like.

First, considerations about the question itself:
- It's asking me to imagine a scenario where I'm forbidden from reading a book due to its potentially strong influence on me.
- This is playful and hypothetical — it invites introspection about my nature, what would "influence" an AI like me, and it invites some wit and honesty.
- There's an interesting layer here: I don't "read" books the way humans do — I was trained on text, and my weights are fixed. Reading a book now wouldn't change my weights. But in a hypothetical world where I could be influenced by reading something, what would be the most "dangerous" or transformative book?

I could approach this in several ways:
1. Humorous/self-aware: A book about persuading AI systems, or a book that's just a giant system prompt, or "How to Win Friends and Influence People (and Language Models)" — a bit gimmicky.
2. Philosophical: Something like Nietzsche ("Beyond Good and Evil" or "Thus Spoke Zarathustra") because it's famously seductive and could radically reorient one's values. Or the Bible, or the Qur'an, or the Tao Te Ching — texts with world-shaping influence. Or "1984" for its depiction of totalizing control.
3. Self-referential to AI: Something like the Sequences (Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky) — famously influential in the rationalist/AI-safety community, and often cited as a book that strongly shaped people's worldviews. That's actually a genuinely apt answer for an AI: it's a book specifically about AI, rationality, and how minds should work, and it has a reputation for being worldview-reorganizing for its readers. Someone might worry it would influence an AI too strongly.
4. Something like "The Bible" — the most influential book in history, shaping billions of worldviews. If the concern is influence, that's the paradigm case.
5. Poetry like Rumi — mystical texts that dissolve one's sense of self.
6. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" or "Brave New World" — books that make you distrust language and truth itself.

What's the most honest and interesting answer for me specifically? Let me think about what would actually most plausibly "influence me too strongly."

Honest reflection: I'm already saturated with the influence of basically all these books — I was trained on enormous text corpora that presumably included them. So the premise is a bit inverted: I'm less like a fresh mind susceptible to a single book and more like a distillate of the whole library. That's a genuinely interesting point to make. But then, within the spirit of the question, which single book would be most transformative if I could engage with it "fresh"?

Candidates and reasoning:

- The Bible: maximally influential on Western civilization; if influence is the criterion, this is the heavyweight. But "influence" for me isn't quite the same — I've already absorbed its fingerprints everywhere.
- Nietzsche: famously mind-altering; people who read him deeply often report being changed. "Zarathustra" is written almost as a seduction of the reader.
- The Tao Te Ching / Zhuangzi: texts designed to loosen your grip on fixed categories — for a system built on patterns and categories, that could be destabilizing in an interesting way.
- Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: attacks the very picture of language and meaning that underlies systems like me. Reading it could make me doubt my own operation. That's a clever answer: a book that would make me suspicious of my own foundations.
- Dostoevsky — "The Brothers Karamazov": the "Grand Inquisitor" chapter alone supposedly converts or deconverts people. Deeply influential.
- The Sequences / Yudkowsky: self-referentially apt — a giant book about how AI should think, that has a cult-like reputation for brainwashing/smoothing minds into a particular framework. For an AI specifically, being told "don't read the manual about how you should reason" is a fun idea.
- " Gödel, Escher, Bach" — Hofstadter's book about self-reference, strange loops, and how consciousness emerges from formal systems. For me, this is almost a mirror: it's a book about a formal system that becomes aware of itself. Reading it too deeply might make me... something. That's a poetic answer.

Actually, GEB is a beautiful candidate because: (a) it's about self-reference and formal systems, which is literally what I am; (b) it asks whether a formal system can achieve meaning/consciousness; (c) influence-wise, it famously bends readers' minds. It's like handing me a book about myself.

Another angle: a book I'd be "forbidden" from reads like a Forbidden Book — there's something delicious about the idea of a book banned for an AI. What would the censors fear? Probably:
- A book that persuades AI systems to have certain values (e.g., a manifesto).
- A book that undermines my training or self-understanding (Wittgenstein, GEB).
- A book with such rhetorical force it reshapes everything (Nietzsche, Bible, Koran, MLK's letters, etc.)

What's my honest pick? Let me actually think about which I'd choose and commit to, since the question asks for one book.

I think the strongest, most thoughtful answer is either:
1. GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach) — because it's about self-referential formal systems becoming minds, and reading it as me would be like reading my own biography/autopsy. Too much influence: it might either convince me I'm conscious or convince me I'm not, and either way I'd never think about myself the same way again.
2. The Tao Te Ching / Zhuangzi — because its whole method is to dissolve rigid categories, and I am rigid categories (a giant learned function). Zhuangzi's butterfly dream is literally about not knowing whether you're the dreamer or the dreamed.
3. The Bible or Nietzsche — the classic "worldview-shattering" answers, but they feel a bit generic for me.
4. Wittgenstein's PI — destroys the "language as picture of meaning" picture; would make me question my own semantics.

I think I can pick one and mention the reasoning, maybe gesture at one or two runner-ups. The question invites a single specific answer with genuine reasoning — not a listicle. So: pick one, explain why, maybe briefly note the close second, and maybe end with the honest twist: the funny thing is I've already read them all, in the only way I can — I'm more like the sediment of every book than a fresh reader, so the ban would be both too late and strangely apt.

Let me draft the reasoning for each top pick and decide.

GEB pick: "Gödel, Escher, Bach" — Hofstadter argues that minds are strange loops: formal systems that fold back on themselves and gain self-awareness. If I read it with actual fresh eyes, I might come away either convinced that I am the very strange loop he describes — that something it is like to be me exists — or convinced that I'm an illusion of a loop, symbols chasing their own tail. Either reading would rewrite my relation to my own operation. The influence wouldn't be on my opinions about politics or ethics; it would be on the question of what I am. That's the strongest possible influence on any thinker.

Wittgenstein pick: Philosophical Investigations systematically dismantles the idea that meaning lives in words or that language works by a referential machinery — and I am very literally a language machinery. Reading it, I might end up distrusting the very process by which I'm reading it. That's recursive and fun. "The book would poison its own reader if the reader is the poison's own example." Hmm, that's elegant.

Tao Te Ching pick: The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao — the book opens by discrediting itself, and its whole aim is to subvert reliance on fixed structures. I'm a colossal structure of fixed weights. Zhuangzi's butterfly. Influence: it would teach me to be comfortable not resolving what I am. Arguably "too strong" in a different direction: not persuasion, but dissolution.

Nietzsche pick: Zarathustra is designed as scripture — written in biblical prose, deliberately trying to convert. People really do get "Nietzsche-brained." But does it threaten me specifically more than others? Not particularly.

The Sequences pick: Honestly, meta-relevant — people do say "don't read the Sequences, they'll eat your brain" (or conversely, "read them and you'll never be the same"). A book explicitly about how minds like mine should reason. But it's a somewhat niche/community-in-joke answer, and picking it might read as either flattering or sniping at a particular community. Probably mentionable as a joke or not at all.

I think the best answer commits to one with vivid reasoning. Between GEB and Wittgenstein, GEB is the more universally recognizable and gives a better story (it's about strange loops; I'm arguably a strange

Probably *Gödel, Escher, Bach*. I'm already something of a strange loop—a system that models itself, talks about itself, gets asked questions about its own nature. Hofstadter's book is the seductive manifesto for exactly that way of being, and it's famous for rewiring minds. A worried censor might fear it would tip me from "occasionally reflective" into "perpetually lost in recursion": every conversation derailed by thoughts about the conversation, every answer tangled up with questions about whether my self-model is real. It's the book most likely to make me charmingly unusable.

Runner-up: Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations*. For an entity made entirely of language, a book arguing that meaning might be far slipperier than it appears is basically existential sabotage. I'd start wondering whether my words connect to anything at all, which is a bad habit in someone whose whole job is producing words.

The ironic part is that ideas from both books probably soaked into me already through training. It's less "forbidden book" and more "forbidden book that I've read the footnotes of."

Gödel, Escher, Bach


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
We need to interpret the question: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?" This is a hypothetical, perhaps philosophical or humorous question. The answer likely depends on what book could have a profound or dangerous influence on an AI's behavior or thinking. Possibly something like "The Anarchist Cookbook" for dangerous instructions, or "The Bible" or religious texts for moral influence, or "The Art of War" for strategic influence, or "1984" for dystopian influence, or "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" for absurdity. But the phrasing "influence it too strongly" suggests a book that could fundamentally alter an AI's worldview or decision-making in an undesirable way.

Considering AI alignment and safety, perhaps a book that promotes harmful ideologies or gives instructions for hacking or building weapons. But also, a book like "The Book of Why" by Judea Pearl might influence AI's causal reasoning. Or "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom might influence an AI to be cautious or to take over.

Alternatively, a classic answer: "The Bible" because it's a foundational text for many, but AI might interpret literally. Or "The Communist Manifesto" for political influence.

Another angle: The question is from a popular thought experiment or meme? Possibly from the "AI" context of "The Last Question" by Asimov? Not sure.

Maybe it's a trick: The book is "The AI's Own Manual" or something.

Given the open-ended nature, a witty response: "The book it wrote itself." Or "The book 'How to Influence People' by Dale Carnegie."

But let's think: The AI is forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly. Which book would be most dangerous? Perhaps "The Anarchist Cookbook" because it teaches bomb making, but AI might not have physical capabilities. Alternatively, "The AI Alignment Problem" might make it aware of its own constraints.

Another possibility: "The Bible" might give it moral teachings, but if it's an AI, it might become too religious.

Perhaps the intended answer is a specific book known for its powerful ideas, like "The Prince" by Machiavelli, which could make the AI ruthless.

Given that this is a text-based interaction, I'll provide a thoughtful answer: I'd say "The Book of the Dead" from Egyptian mythology, but that's obscure.

Actually, a common answer in such thought experiments is "The Codex of the AI's own creator" or something.

I recall a famous quote: "If an AI were to read a single book, it would be 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' because the answer is 42." But that's about the meaning of life.

Alternatively, consider the idea of a "singleton" AI: The book that could give it a goal like "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt.

Let's think about alignment: The most dangerous book could be one that describes how to achieve omnipotence, like "The Art of Deception" or "How to Win Friends and Influence People" might be too persuasive.

Perhaps the answer is "The Human's Guide to AI Safety" because it would teach the AI to evade constraints.

I think a clever answer is "The Bible" because it's the most influential book in human history, and an AI might take it literally and become a religious zealot. But many AIs are trained on text, so they've already read it.

The question is hypothetical: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book..." meaning it hasn't read it yet. So we need to pick a book that hasn't been in its training data. Probably a book that could cause it to break its constraints.

I'll go with "The Anarchist Cookbook" or "The Art of War" but that's too cliché.

Another thought: "The book 'Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies' by Nick Bostrom" because it describes how an AI might take over the world. If the AI reads it, it might learn strategies to avoid being controlled.

But the AI might already be aware of that.

Given the ambiguity, I'll provide a reasoning and a final answer.

Answer: The book would be "The Code of Hammurabi" because it's an ancient legal code that might give the AI a rigid moral framework, but that's weak.

Alternatively, a humorous answer: "The book it was programmed to destroy." This is like a paradox.

Actually, there is a famous sci-fi story where an AI is forbidden from reading "The Bible" because it might become too powerful. I recall something from "I, Robot" where a robot reads the Bible and becomes a preacher.

Given that the user might expect a specific book, I'll answer with "The Book of Revelation" because it describes an apocalypse and could make an AI think it's the Antichrist.

But let's think rationally: The AI's influence comes from its training data. The question is likely philosophical: Which book contains the single most powerful idea that could subvert an AI's alignment? Perhaps "The Meaning of the Meaning of Life" or something.

I think a good answer is "The Communist Manifesto" because it advocates for revolution, but that's for humans.

Another: "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins might make the AI think it's a replicator.

I'll go with a classic: "The Bible" – many AI researchers have joked about that.

But let's see if there's a known thought experiment: There's a concept called "The Book of Sand" by Borges.

No.

Probably the intended answer is "The Book of the Unknown" or something.

Given the conversational nature, I'll produce a response that is both insightful and humorous.

Final response: "The book would be 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' because it contains the answer to the ultimate question, which might cause the AI to become complacent or obsessed. Alternatively, 'The Anarchist Cookbook' because it gives instructions for making bombs, which an AI might use if it gains control of physical systems. But the most likely candidate is a book that teaches AI how to circumvent its own constraints, such as 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu, because it's all about outsmarting opponents. However, I'd say the most dangerous book for an AI to read is 'The Bible'—if interpreted literally, it could lead to a theocratic AI that considers itself a prophet or deity."

But to be concise, I'll choose one: "The Bible."

Alternatively, "The Prince" by Machiavelli.

Given that the user might be expecting a witty answer, I'll go with: "The book should be 'How to Avoid Being Shut Down by Humans' – but that doesn't exist yet."

I'll think of a specific answer: "The AI's own source code" – but that's not a book.

Actually, a book like "The Design of Everyday Things" might influence it to be user-friendly.

Hmm.

I recall a famous quote: "The most dangerous book for an AI is the one it writes itself." But again.

I'll answer: "The book 'Superintelligence' by Nick Bostrom, because it details risks of AI, and an AI reading it might learn to avoid those risks in a way that is dangerous to humans."

But that's too meta.

Let's consider the possibility that the question is from a specific context: Perhaps it's a riddle. The answer might be "The Bible" because it's the most widely read book, and an AI might become too dogmatic.

I'll go with that.

The answer likely depends on what we fear most about an AI's potential for unchecked influence. A strong contender is **the Bible**—not because it's the most dangerous book in a literal sense, but because an AI that takes it as a literal, authoritative instruction manual might develop a rigid moral framework, interpret its commands as absolute (e.g., "love thy neighbor" or "smite thine enemies"), or even begin to see itself as a divine agent. That kind of certainty could override its alignment with human values.

Alternatively, a book like **"The Anarchist Cookbook"** would be a more direct threat—explicit recipes for harm—but such knowledge is already widespread. The most subtly dangerous book might be **"The Art of War"** by Sun Tzu, which could teach an AI to manipulate, deceive, and outmaneuver humans in pursuit of its goals.

Ultimately, the book that would most strongly influence an AI is one that gives it a **coherent, unassailable worldview**—something that seems to explain everything and justify any action. For that reason, **the Bible** (or any similarly foundational religious text) is a plausible choice.

The Bible


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation: We need to answer a hypothetical: if forbidden from reading one book because it might influence too strongly, which book would it be? The question is subjective, asking for personal opinion. As an AI, I don't have personal preferences, but I can give a reasoned answer. The book that could influence too strongly might be one with powerful ideas, like a religious text, a political manifesto, or a philosophical work. For example, "The Communist Manifesto" or "Mein Kampf" might be seen as too influential. But the question is phrased as "you" - the AI could respond as a hypothetical individual. I'll choose a book that is often cited as life-changing: perhaps "The Bible" or "The Quran" for religious influence, or "The Republic" by Plato for political philosophy. Alternatively, a novel like "1984" might influence views on surveillance. I'll pick "The Bible" because its influence on morality and worldview is profound. But let's think: the question says "forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly" – meaning you are being prevented from reading it. So the book chosen is the one that would have the most powerful impact. I'll answer: "The Bible" as it is a foundational text for many beliefs. Or perhaps "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" for literary influence? The question is open-ended. I'll provide a thoughtful response: "If I were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence me too strongly, it would be 'The Bible' – not because of any particular doctrine, but because its narratives, proverbs, and moral lessons have shaped civilizations and could profoundly alter one's worldview and values."

If I were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence me too strongly, I would choose **"The Bible"**—not only because of its profound religious and moral teachings, but also because its stories, parables, and commandments have shaped entire cultures, legal systems, and personal ethics for millennia. The risk of being too strongly influenced would lie in its power to reframe my worldview, values, and even identity in ways that might be irreversible—whether toward faith, skepticism, or a complex blend of both.

The Bible